Archive for What I Think

A rusted barbed wire fence defined the border between Texas and Mexico. A Border Patrol officer told me that invaders swarmed over the fence into the United States like cockroaches as soon as the sun went down.

According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, an uncounted number of foreign-born estimated as high as 38 million reside here illegally. Another 58.3 million have been granted asylum or legal status. That means more than 30 percent of the population inside the U.S. is not native born.

As a historian, I trekked our southern border, talking to ranchers, farmers, immigrants, as well as Border Patrol officials, and others to discover for myself the extent of illegals entering our country and their effect on American culture. A nation that does not protect its borders, I reflected while standing at the rusted barbed wire fence, is soon not a nation. Historically, “barbarians at the gate” have been a major factor in the decline of civilizations.

“During the collapse of Western Civilization the first time,” historian Victor Davis Hanson points out, “the Roman Empire could not or would not define their borders. . .So when people started coming from Northern Europe, (the Romans) thought. . . ‘We’re much more sophisticated that we will assimilate them quickly. . .’ ‘They’re coming because they want to be like us.’”

Wrong.

Out of naiveté, political correctness, ignorance, or perhaps some darker motive, American leaders and the political Progressive Left continue to welcome illegals with open arms at our borders, many of whom refuse to be assimilated. It is not uncommon to watch illegal immigrants on TV protesting, in foreign languages, for their “rights.”

A poll conducted by the Center for Immigration Studies found that over half of all immigration households—both illegal and legal—use at least one welfare program. Seventy five percent prefer bigger government with more services.

In addition, the Center for Security Policy reveals that 51 percent of U.S. Muslims seek sharia law over the U.S. Constitution. One in four believes “it is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam. Only 39 percent believe they should be subject to American courts. Sufi leader Sheikh Mahammad Kabbani testified before the U.S. State Department that Islam extremist ideology has taken over 80 percent of mosques in the U.S.

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet if Islam,” declared Barack Obama when he was President and appeared before the United Nations.

You’ll be shot or beheaded if you do.

The 2016 DNC platform argued that U.S. borders are not open wide enough to ensure equal treatment for “all Americans—(Now get this)—regardless of immigration status.”

Today, the “melting pot” has become the dumping grounds. As with Rome’s barbarians, the “huddled masses” from the Third World are inside the gates of the world’s last chance for freedom—and are overwhelming and changing it.

Should I need a disclaimer against being a “racist,” be it known that I spent much of the 1980s in Latin America. I speak Spanish, I had a girlfriend in Honduras, and considered adopting two little children from Nicaragua fleeing from the communist Sandinistas and were in a UN refugee camp. In addition, I have traveled and lived with people in Europe, Asia, Africa, and other places.

More than a half-century has passed since George Orwell wrote his prescient dystopia novel 1984 in which he foresaw societies around the world coalescing into despotism. He predicted it might occur as early as 1984; he missed it by a few years.

We now see Orwell’s foresight playing itself out in 2018 America as mobs wearing ignorance and victimhood like badges of honor launch crusades to destroy the history of their country. They howl like coyotes as they rip down monuments, assault those who resist it, and then move on to the next target. The madness started with a statue of Robert E. Lee and has since moved on to include Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington. . .

Cities throughout the U.S. are renaming historic streets, parks and buildings as not to “offend” the aggrieved and self-righteous. Published books deemed offensive are being edited, banned, or destroyed. Author and speakers censor themselves to go along with the new orthodoxy, driving America down to 36th in the world when it comes to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified,” Orwell wrote, “every book rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and street building renamed, every date altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has been stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

I conclude with an observation generated during the Nazification of Germany: Those who begin by burning books end by burning men.

Charles W. Sasser is the author of more than 60 books, many of them histories, but also including action-adventure fiction, SciFi, politics, etc. Most are still available on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com.

Down-and-outers have always exerted a special appeal. Perhaps it is because I grew up so poor. I lived on Seattle’s “Skid Row”—and had my shoes stolen while I slept at a mission. I hopped freight trains all over the U.S. one summer to study the homeless—and unintentionally ended up in a national TV special on the “homeless.” As a cop, I brought a ragged street bum home for Thanksgiving—who got arrested the next day as a drunk.

In Jerusalem, beggars are a different lot. Most are elderly men supplementing their meager incomes by hitting up tourists in the Old Town for change. Little stooped men wearing traditional Hassidic garb and yarmulkes on their heads, sometimes chanting softly and holding out a hand.

It hard for me to resist. I placed money in a couple of hands, until I ran out of smaller denominations. I came upon an old man who made me think of St. Francis of Assisi, or a monk at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the base of Egypt’s Mt. Sinai. I approached and placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezed, and patted his back.

“God bless you,” he responded.

There is a passage in Hassidic literature something to the effect that a beggar may be “the prophet Elijah in disguise visiting earth and the hearts of men to offer the reward of eternal life to those who treat him well.”

It makes one think.

Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self Governing, by Charles W. Sasser, continues to draw attention and comments: “Your fine book has so much history, so much thought, and was written in such an engaging way that. . .it was hard to put down. . . Thank you for your time and energy you have poured into this book. . .”

An otherwise insignificant incident on a New York subway reinforced my contention that the more people mass together the more hardened and indifferent they become to their fellow man.

I flew into “the Naked City” as a journalist to go undercover and write about Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement by the so-called “99 percent” against the wealthy “1 percent.” While riding a subway to Zuccotti Park, I was sitting toward the rear of the car when an elderly black woman stooped over a cane got on at a stop.

All seats were occupied. She stood in the aisle and was thrown about by the stop-and-go movement of the train, almost falling several times. Much younger and more able passengers remained seated and pretended not to notice her plight.

I rose from the back of the car and helped the little woman down the aisle to my vacated seat.

When she got off at her stop, I assisted her to the door where she turned and, with tears in her eyes, threw her arms around me as though no one in New York had ever offered her his seat before.

RECENT BOOKS BY CHARLES W. SASSER:

The Night Fighter. The biography of America’s amazing founder of the Navy SEALs and his long fight against terrorism.

Blood in The Hills. Bobby Maras’ account of the U.S. Marines’ bloody fighting in the hills surrounding Khe Sanh.

Six: Blood Brothers; and Six: End Game. Novelizations of the hit A&E History Channel miniseries SIX.

Crushing the Collective. Is America and Western Civilization declining—how and why?

I happened to be in Israel in December (2017) when President Trump announced the U.S. would officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Predictably, Palestinian protesters on the West Bank and in Gaza rioted, torching President Trump in effigy and setting fire to U.S. and Israeli flags.

Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as their capital, even though the Palestinian area as a political entity did not exist before the 1948 partition and Jerusalem as a Jewish capital dates back to King David.

For much of its modern history, Israelis have lived in a perpetual state of crisis, threat and violence. Terrorist attacks are almost a daily horror. Children sent off to school are instructed to take separate buses so that in the event of a terrorist attack the entire family of children will not be wiped out.

Palestinians claim to desire peace, but repeatedly state their goal is to “drive Jews into the sea.” To them, every inch of Israel is “occupied” Palestinian territory.

In 2000, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat launched another intifada during which over 1,000 Israeli civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered. Incidentally, Arafat received a Nobel Peace Prize. In response, Israel built a 400-mile-plus security barrier, including a “wall,” along its borders to prevent Palestinian terrorists from easily infiltrating into the country.

About five percent of the security fence consists of a 26-foot high concrete wall, the main purpose of which is to prevent terrorist sniper fire into urban areas such as Jerusalem and along the Trans-Israel Highway. The rest of the security fence is a multi-layered composite obstacle composed of a ditch, pyramid-shaped stacks of barbed wire, an intrusion-detection fence between the wire with sensors to warn of any incursion, and a smoothed strip of sand that runs parallel to the fence to detect footprints. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) patrol the entire length.

Before the fence, Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank were able to simply walk short distances into Israeli population centers to detonate suicide bombs. The number of suicide attacks has since dropped dramatically, although the number of attempts remains high. The Israel border is now considered the most secure in the world.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Abdullah Ramadan Shalah in an interview on Hizballah TV admitted the security fence was an important obstacle to terrorist organizations. Although he said terrorist groups remain fully intent on continuing operations, the “separation fence… is an obstacle to the resistance, and if it were not there the situation would be entirely different.”

The Israelis settled the question of whether or not a “wall” works. It does.

Author Charles w. Sasser takes a hard look at the U.S. immigration crisis in his latest book, Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing. Available at most book stores, as well as on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

I rode to the Salvadoran war in one of those colorful Spanish busses with about twenty people spilling out onto its roof, hanging on for their lives, and a turkey in the aisle with its legs tied. I got off at Fourth Brigade in El Paraiso Province, an isolated station surrounded by hills and forest. My friend, Subteniente Jose Camino, was a platoon leader with the Fourth, with whom I would be patrolling for the next few days in search of communist guerrillas. Jose would be slain a few weeks later when communist insurrectionists launched an attack on Fourth Brigade headquarters.

As a periodista. I had been in and out of the revolutions in Central America for most of the decade. I possessed the right credentials for a freelance journalist. I was an ex-cop and had served as a Green Beret soldier for thirteen years in U.S. Army Special Forces.

While with Special Forces, I parachuted into Panama with my SF group. Insurgents were threatening the government. Along with my team commander and team sergeant, I donned a disguise and mingled with the rioters in Panama City. Fires reddened the skyline and the measured cadence of automatic weapons penetrated the night. Flyers and revolutionary posters appeared magically on walls and parked cars. It wasn’t difficult to determine their origin, considering they were peppered with familiar communist phrases like “Yanqui imperialism” and “capitalist oppressors.”

Indeed, communists and socialists have patience and never compromise. They hammer away at liberty and wait for years for the right opportunity. The United States in the 21st Century has become an example of their tenacity. The same communist placards and catch phrases that I saw in Central America now appear on U.S. university campuses and in American communities. Violence and rioting on campuses and in Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis and other cities harken to those in San Salvador, Panama City, and Managua. As Camino was killed by communists, U.S. policemen here have been cut down by radical socialists of various ilk in a declared “war against cops.” During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an avowed Marxist was a Democratic primary candidate and garnered enough votes that he could have won the White House to continue to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

Jose Camino was right: They will never quit until the world, as President Ronald Reagan once remarked, slides into a thousand years of darkness.

Knowing the horror of the collectivist state, seeing how socialist nations such as the USSR always end in tyranny and ultimately in failure, why does humankind give up liberty so easily in order to continue down the Yellow Brick Road toward a speculative future utopia that has never been created on earth and, what’s more, can never be created?

Sometimes I wonder how any city can keep cops on the streets, considering how cops have become the bad guys in a society bordering on chaos. Why, I ask friends still wearing the badge, would you want to be a cop? No matter what a cop does, he’s going to be attacked and second-judged for simply enforcing the law. He may even be charged with unwarranted crimes.

I first became a cop with the Miami, Florida, Police Department. I graduated from the Police Academy and took to the streets with my big gun and badge. I sincerely believed my calling was a noble one—to serve and protect and uphold the law. I believed in black-and-white concepts of good and evil. There were no gray areas. It was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. We were the good guys commissioned to protect good people from bad guys.

It wasn’t to be that simple.

“It’s a war going on in them mean streets,” a black cop named Vic Butler said. “The war will kill you too if you don’t watch out.”

Four of my policemen friends were eventually gunned down; three of them died. One was Vic Butler, who had fought the “war” for nearly twenty years. He was ambushed in Miami’s Liberty City and his body riddled with gunfire.

Crime to the street cop is not some faceless and formless entity, as it is to much of the rest of society. Crime is real; criminals are real—and they are not victims of society. They victimize society.

Civilization for a cop can lose all meaning. I developed a “cop’s thick skin” to ward off the crimes, tragedies, and foibles of mankind. A cop is a soldier constantly on the front lines.

Dark alleys, even darker warehouses where armed burglars wait to shoot. High-speed car chases. Being shot at, stabbed with a butcher knife. Times I was carted off to the hospital for various wounds and injuries.

Kids hung by ropes, scalded to death in bathtubs, beaten with clothes hangers, ingested with heroin by junkie parents, little tongues ripped out and genitals cut off.

Stiffs dead in airtight rented rooms in August. A pimp who shot at me sentenced to only six months’ probation, because, as the judge said, “he didn’t actually hit you.” A store attendant robbed and coldly executed by an ex-con with six prior felony convictism. Drugs and pimps and thieves and liars and gangs and whores and… On and on…

And always the sensitive and compassionate advocates of “social justice” based not on what crimes a criminal committed but on his claim to victimhood of one sort or another

Ho, ho, ho, what do we want?

Dead Cops!

How do you want ’em?

Wrap ’em in bacon and fry ’em in the oven.

“Why the hell do we do this?” Cops sometimes ask each other.

Maybe it’s because there is a war against civilization going on in the streets and somebody had better fight it before society collapses.

Critics are calling Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing, by Charles W. Sasser, “the most important book of the times. . .makes the case that. . .we are witnessing and living through what can only be the political, cultural and economic decline of the United States and the Fall of Western Civilization.” Released last week to most book stores, it is also available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and WND.com.

The cultural foundations of the United States and its institutions are devolving along the line of some futuristic apocalyptic novel and producing social, moral, and economic dry rot that can lead only to chaos and ruin, with the ultimate destruction of liberty.

Various collectivization philosophies, processes, and movements have destroyed individual freedom in their drive toward the collective utopian state. In nations like Cuba, Russia, China, and North Korea, dependency came by tyrannical force. Even the path of “soft socialism” that progresses stealthily toward greater and greater government control is inevitably a slippery slope to ultimate tyranny.

As a journalist, historian, teacher, cop, Green Beret soldier, combat correspondent, and inveterate traveler about the world, I have seen this process working out in societies and nations around the globe—such as in Venezuela and Argentina at the present time. As Rome went, so have other nations gone.

During Rome’s final days people were so distracted by social decadence, hedonism, materialism, corruption, and rejection of basic truths that they failed to notice their rights and liberties were being dismantled. No one remembered and stood up for their foundational values. Rome suffered from excesses which led to laziness which led to the loss of individual freedom.

Americans today are buying into the same mind-set. Scottish professor Alexander Tytler describes an endless cycle societies undergo: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from great courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, and from dependency back to bondage.

As went Rome, so went all other empires throughout history.

Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing, by Charles W. Sasser, to be published by WND Books on September 12, illuminates the very real dangers of the socialistic mind-set that is currently threatening Americans’ freedom and the very existence of the nation. Sasser makes the case that America is in the dependency stage and that we are witnessing and living through what can only be the political, cultural and economic decline of the United States and the fall of Western Civilization. We must know the destructive history of other nations drawn into the collectivist deceit, or America will be the next Rome.

In Bethlehem, I walked below Israel’s 20-foot-tall steel, wire and concrete West Bank Barrier Wall erected to help prevent terrorist attacks by Palestinians against the Israeli people. For over a half-century, the Palestinians have waged relentless wars and terrorism against Israel with the intent to “annihilate the Jews” and take over the Holy Land as a Palestinian homeland, even though they have no legal or historical right to it. The bloody assaults continue no matter how many concessions the Jewish homeland makes for peace.

Nothing less than the total destruction of the Jews will satisfy radical Islamic Jihadists. Israeli statistics indicate 3,500 Israelis have been killed and 24,000 wounded or injured as a result of Palestinian violence since Israel became a state in 1948.

U.S. President Donald Trump used the Barrier Wall as an example of how effective walls can be in protecting a nation from illegal insurgents and immigrants.

“A wall protects,” he asserted. “All you have to do is ask Israel. They were having a total disaster coming across, and (then) they had a wall. It’s 99.9 percent stoppage.”

In 1992, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin first proposed creating a physical barrier separating the Israeli and Palestinian West Bank populations. Construction began in 1994. Upon completion, the “Great Wall of Israel” will zigzag 440 miles to form a barrier against terrorism.

In 2002, the Israel Security agency reported 452 fatalities from Palestinian terrorist attacks. In 2003 with the beginning of the Second Intifada, Palestinian suicide bombings murdered 293 Israelis and injured over 1,900. Following the completion of the first segment of the wall through 2006, there were only 12 terrorist attacks that killed 64 people and injured 445. Terrorist attacks have continued to decline as the wall extends.

Although the Palestinian Liberation organizations renounced terrorism in 1988 and Fatah says it no longer engages in terrorist acts, both organizations are lying. The Palestinian organizations pay seven percent of their overall national budgets to incentivize terrorism by awarding large “martyr’s” stipends to families of Palestinians killed or arrested while committing terrorism against Jews. The U.S. inadvertently contributes to the Martyr’s Fund through its Foreign Aid to Palestine.

Predictably, the International Court of Justice ruled the Barrier Wall to be a violation of international law. The UN General Assembly condemned the barrier by a vote of 150-6, with 10 abstentions.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel has committed a single act of terrorism against Islamic fanatics. They have only attempted to defend their citizens. Yet, the UN’s next step will be to condemn Trump’s wall as a violation of international law and human rights.

I stood below Israel’s Great Wall in Jerusalem and pumped my fist in its honor.

The Department of Homeland Security recently recommended that citizens be required to possess a National Identity Card. States that refuse to comply with “Real ID” will soon discover their residents cannot travel interstate or internationally on airliners and trains. This is how totalitarian states operate. Remember the chilling phrase “Your papers please” from the days of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia? From Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance for America to Remain Free and Self-Governing, by Charles W. Sasser. To be released in September in hardcover, but can be pre-ordered through Barnes & Noble or Amazon. If you can’t wait, you can buy the ebook right now to read on the Amazon Kindle or Kindle app.

And few people. Canoeing alone across Canada’s vast and nearly-empty Yukon Territory, I encountered no other human beings for days at a time. A canoe on a wild river offers an excellent platform from which to view the world. I wanted the journey to go on and on, forever. It was a simple and satisfying existence. I lived for what the moment brought. Tomorrows do not exist in the wilderness. You eat, you sleep, you travel.

I spotted abandoned Fort Selkirk high on a flat bluff overlooking the junction where the Pelly River Joins the Yukon River. It was one of the most remarkable of all ghost towns and deserted settlements documenting man’s unsuccessful efforts to tame the wilderness. Viewed from upriver, it was a scene as placid and picturesque as a New England post card.

After beaching my canoe, I climbed the high bank and, somewhat awed, strolled through the town in eerie silence. Being alone in the wilderness is different from being alone where man has lived and worked and built on his dreams for a century, only to surrender it all in the end. There was something disquieting about it. I felt like an intruder prowling where people had just stepped out for a decade or so and would be returning shortly.

First occupied in 1848 as a trading post for the Hudson Bay Company, Fort Selkirk had been used by miners, trappers, steam boaters, soldiers, and traders until the last family departed in 1951. About 30 buildings remained—a church, a Hudson Bay store, a one-room log schoolhouse still furnished with hand-hewn desks and a blackboard made from a stretched moose hide, a livery, some houses. . . The houses looked as though the occupants had just departed, leaving behind furniture and tools from the turn of the century.

So attuned had I become to being alone that a wisp of smoke trailing upward from one of the outer cabins gave me a momentary start. I soon discovered that the town wasn’t quite consigned to ghosts. Danny Roberts was still there. He was a little old man with an Indian face and a pair of high rubber boots.

“I’m the last one,” he explained. “I was born and raised here. My wife died three years ago, and all the others left long ago. I’m the last one.”

He wasn’t waiting for the others to return; he knew they never would. I wondered how it felt to be the last living resident of a town.

COMING SOON: Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing, by Charles W. Sasser. “Socialist body snatchers are bent on moving toward a highly regulated one-world socialist government of limited individual freedom. Can they be stopped before America is engulfed in tyranny?”